Re: "except" found?

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

Jprge:
> > Are you really comforrtable about remembering to use
> >{jia nai kau} in subordinate bridi?
> Not really, that was more of an "it can be done if you really want to"
> sort of suggestion. I don't think I would ever use it, but then I would
> probably interpret the discursive as having scope over the subordinate
> clause only.

Very reprehensible, that.

> >Why do you have to press UI into use for things that really ought to be
> >handled by the logical bit of the bangu? -- feo.
> Well, because I want to be able to use the language spontaneously at
> some point. To figure out the underlying logic of some complexes like
> "except" takes some thinking, and the same to process it from the
> receiving end. Higher level shortcuts like "except" are useful, I think.
Lojbab:
> The discursives are among other things intended to be used for
> naturalistic short forms for regular logical apparatus.

I'm not sure we really need them. At least the case for short forms
ought to be really strong. Yes, to figure out the logic of something
first time is really hard, but once that's been done we can start to
get familiar with it. And I don't think this process of familiarization
necessarily requires short forms; it just needs practice.

Also, it seems a potentially confusing syntax-semntics mismatch to mix up
discursives with logical stuff.

> Thus, I think that "po'o" should be equivalent to some fairly well-stated
> logical formula, which may be dependent on the structure it is attached
> to. But in the case of "only" we assigned it to such a cmavo only after
> looking seriously at how many varieties oflogical structures were needed
> to express a concept that is apparently straightforward n natlangs. There
> were thus a LOT of postings with lots of logical structures in them,
> before we decided to make "po'o" a word.

That's not what my admittedly very hazy memory tells me. What I remember
is people getting mixed up by the multifarious different senses of "only"
(e.g. "merely"). Is the original proposal for po'o, with rationale, kept
in an archive somewhere? Was it given the pc stamp of approval?

> In any case, now that pc has added (or inflicted, as Nora is starting to
> feel as she plows through it for this household) McCawley to our list
> of resources,

I know of no better book on logic & linguistics. Colin used to cite
Dowty, Wall & Peters _Intro to Montague Semantics_, which is the most
difficult book I've ever read - or so it felt. McCawley coruscates
in my personal pantheon.

> we have decidedly taken a stronger bent for at least KNOWING how to do
> things the logical way before trying to find short cuts.

I look forward to seeing evidence of this.

> Too many unending discussions of the last couple years have been that
> way because we failed to nail down the porblem in commonly understood
> terminology before we tried to "solve" it.  Now for example, pc has told
> me on the side that one problem with the "any" discussion is that we were
> probably using "opaque" to mean more than one thing - a real problem
> since half of us can't keep straight what opaque meant in any context,
> much less dealing with an ambiguous meaning shift between contexts and
> users of the term.

Any moderately complex and multi-participant discussion will suffer from
problems like this. 95% of the problem is failure to communicate, and
only a small residue is genuinely substantive.
i coo; mie and